Bryce wasn’t sure why Ms. Reed had reassigned him to a routine field security shift after the meeting with President Atienza, but he figured surviving the Tondo Tussle had earned him a brief reprieve.
The view was nothing short of beautiful. Taal Lake spread out beneath Bryce, with the tip of the Taal Volcano right in the center of the lake. From the lookout, he caught the vast forests of palm trees blanketing the land, roads winding between them and leading to secluded homes. Several resorts, hotels, restaurants, and casinos were erected north of the lake, right on the cliff.
He thought briefly of enjoying himself in those establishments, but that thought left him as quickly as it came. There wasn’t enough time. Would there ever be?
At the sound of tires crunching on dirt, Bryce stepped away from the overlook and greeted the figure, who was now stepping out of one of Metamatics’s fleet sedans.
“Back from the dead, eh, Bryce?” Carbrera called as he made his way over. He slapped Bryce on the back with surprising force for someone so wiry and at least seven inches shorter.
Bryce smirked. “Nice to see you too, Carbrera.”
Upon arriving in Manila, the senior ranking field security agent had been one of Bryce’s first contacts. He seemed to approach his work with the enthusiasm of knowing he would die tomorrow. Or, perhaps that was just how Filipinos were.
“God must be smiling down on you,” Carlo Carbrera began, taking in the view of Taal Lake. “Did you pray?”
“God doesn’t exist,” Bryce said flatly.
“Hoy!” Carbrera huffed. “God just saved your ass, man! Be grateful.” He smirked.
Bryce couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Maybe he did.” He adjusted his wearable, pulling the visor down over his eyes and ensuring his app menu was ready. “So, what are we looking for?”
Carbrera did the same with his device, obscuring his eyes in shadow. “Well, the usual stuff. Maybe some pieces of the Q-96s shell. Components. Heck, if we’re lucky, maybe they lost a shoe.” Carbrera scanned the area. “But, apparently, the shots were reported from this area.”
Bryce searched his surroundings. This wasn’t the only lookout on this side of Taal Lake, but it was the smallest and most secluded. Bryce figured whoever did this would want some cover. “What were they driving?”
“A van. Ripped it right off the fleet network.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah.”
The two men shared a look, and their gazes spoke the words. Giant Killers.
They began as rebel groups in Manila hired by private investors who hated the Giants or were interested in the equipment the drones were made of. They worked for massive payouts, selling the chips and innards of the drones or sometimes the drones themselves. Since chip shortages seemed to occur worldwide once a decade, buyers of stolen networking cards, GPUs, and processors were always interested.
But as the drones multiplied and “Giant Killing” became more straightforward, people started doing it for easy money.
Bryce guessed that’s what they were dealing with now—a few people desperate for food or money and willing to stick it to the Giants to get paid. Why else would they drive fifty kilometers out of Manila to do it?
His thoughts paused when he looked down. His heart quickened as he noticed the grooves embedded in the ground—the tire tracks.
“Carbrera?” Bryce asked. “Think I found something.”
The senior field agent made his way over, but by then, Bryce had already snapped a few photos and sent them over.
Carbrera knelt, studying the tracks. As he inspected his evidence, he adopted a sly grin like a sarcastic Sherlock Holmes.
“What?” Bryce asked. “You can figure that out yourself?”
“I could if it was a motorcycle. But, Nah. Send it back to headquarters and see what we get.”
“I don’t think I’ll have to,” said Bryce, looking down.
Beneath his feet, something small and blue glinted in the dirt. Curious, he bent down, picked it up, and held it to the Philippine sun.
The EMP dart looked much like a recreational dart you’d throw at a circular board but a third of the size. Embedded into its target, it would emit a blast that would overload the target’s circuitry. Bryce had fired them many times from his Glock attachment, but many dedicated firearms only shot EMP darts.
Bryce handed Carbrera the dart. “Giant Killers with guns. And vehicles.”
“Resourceful little buggers, eh?” Carbrera twirled the dart in his fingers. “These Giant Killers are getting sloppy. They must be desperate.” He shook his head.
All the more reason he and Carbrera were looking for someone poorer. Desperation made people dangerous. Bryce knew it well, grateful his parents had pulled him out of this life.
“Did headquarters get back to you?” Carbrera asked.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Bryce, however, didn’t hear this last question. He was too far away, walking to where the road connected to the lookout.
While Carbrera had been inspecting the dart, Bryce had not yet sent the pictures of the tracks back to the Metamatics headquarters. Instead, he fed the images into the pattern recognition app on his wearable. Two blue lines appeared in his private augmented reality a few seconds later, marking the tire tracks. The gap between them was just about the width of a sprinter van’s two tires.
Bryce shared his augmented view with Carbrera, and together, they followed the blue tire track markers down the road. They walked for about twenty minutes, not saying a word until the lines stopped at the side of the road.
“This would be just far enough,” said Bryce, thinking. “What about weather conditions?”
“No rain.” Carbrera looked up. “Hasn’t been too hot lately. There’s not a lot of traffic here, either. It’s not exactly dense.” He looked around as if Bryce needed convincing before settling his gaze on a hill on the opposite side of the road. “Let’s say we get a better view?”
Bryce marked where the van would have stopped, before following Carbrera up the hill. The grass was up to his knees, though he guessed that wouldn’t have stopped a Giant Killer from chasing a drone.
He began to run over the specifics. A van that had been no doubt jacked from Manila’s fleet network, an EMP dart, and a gun to shoot it, and a team of probably a few people. Bryce counted them in his head: a driver, a shooter, someone to pull the drone when it was disabled—or try to—and a lookout. Thus, they were probably looking for at least four people.
“Hey!” Carbrera called. “Hands up! That’s Metamatics property!”
At the top of the hill, Carbrera had pulled out his Glock and was now brandishing it at someone up there.
Bryce withdrew his own, running to the left to catch the target on the flank, and slowly walked up.
“It’s not me!” screamed a Pinoy kid, barely even twelve years old. “I just found it!”
“Yeah?” Carbrera asked. “You’re right here. Maybe you just came back to the scene of the crime?”
“He didn’t do it!” cried a girl around the kid’s age. Both of them wore oversized t-shirts and flip-flops. Both looked like the kind of kids who would clean up the dregs of the Giant Killers, but not the ones who would have shot down the drone.
“Let them go, man,” said Bryce
Carbrera squinted, still pointing the gun. “Go,” he gestured to the road.
The kids ran, their cries fading down the hill. Carbrera still didn’t lower his gun.
“You’re cruel, you know that?” Bryce said, half amused. “They can’t even drive.”
“Sometimes, a good scare does the trick.” Carbrera holstered the Glock before stepping forward and looking down. “Well, I’ll be…”
The two men stood before a smoldering wreck. Burnt and blackened steel lay strewn around them, torn pages and the residue of a dusty blue powder that seemed to get on everything. Bryce recognized the latter instantly.
“Fire extinguisher,” he muttered.
Carbrera nodded. He kicked some of the wreckage around, searching through the debris. “They got everything.” He continued rummaging, throwing fragments of the Q-96s shell away, until he found a steel box large enough to hold shoes. “They even got the books.”
Bryce shook his head, then glanced back at the road, recalling their next move. At the hill, Bryce re-opened the app to find the blue lines stretching onward, marking the van’s path.
Carbrera stepped up beside him, clearly reaching the same conclusion.
“We follow that trail,” Bryce said, a smile tugging at his lips, “and it’s game over for them.”
----------------------------------------
Multo meant ghost in Tagalog. Bryce had read it in a book once, a thriller about a bounty hunter in America searching for illegal immigrants. Books then taught him what little he knew of his homeland. Books, television, the Internet, and situations like tonight.
He felt like a multo now, watching the cars pass by, the world oblivious to his presence. Bonifacio Global City had a way of swallowing people whole, with its gleaming towers and constant hum. The traffic used to be his excuse for lateness to work, but with three new LRT lines, underground tunnels, and fleet mode across most vehicles in the city, even that escape was gone.
The van’s trail hadn’t been hard to trace. The Metamatics Makati office found it parked in Pasig, an office building’s car park. The system would do the rest: emails, surveillance footage, and logs. It was all automated, out of his hands.
Just in time, too.
She was waiting for him in the lobby, curled over her phone, her back to the elevator. Bryce hesitated a moment, taking her in before stepping inside. He remembered the missed calls, the canceled flights, the arguments that felt like they meant something but faded into silence. “Tampo,” she called that cold withdrawal after a fight. It was something he’d never entirely understood but learned to accept.
Yet, through all of it, beginning from a harmless online curiosity, they burgeoned into something that was a little bit more. Bryce would have been lying if he had said his only reason for coming to Manila was work.
When she saw him, she didn’t say a word, just stood and followed him into the elevator. They rode in silence, no tension, just calm. The door to his condo opened automatically, the blinds lowering to block out the Manila’s lights. Bryce showered, clothes still on, letting the water wash away the grime of the last 24 hours—of the slums in Tondo, the dirty Taal roads, and the things he didn’t want to remember.
She waited at the kitchen island, her presence quiet but steady. She dimmed the lights, understanding without words that tonight wasn’t for talking. He slumped on the couch, still damp, not bothering to shave.
Despite what he told her before, she knew they would not be going out for dinner tonight. She didn’t mind, or at least didn’t show it. Instead, she cooked. It was simple, familiar—adobo, steaming over a bed of rice. He didn’t realize how hungry he was until the first bite, the tang of vinegar and soy sauce waking something inside him. He ate in silence, and she didn’t press him, didn’t ask where they stood. She knew better than to prod him at times like this.
But even as the meal filled him, something remained unsatisfied.
She felt it, too.
When he pulled her close, it was slow, deliberate. They moved together, and for a while, there were no questions, no doubts. Just two people sharing the space between them. She trembled against him, her body responding to his every action.
But Bryce’s mind was elsewhere, thinking of another time, another place—of someone else.
They both came down from it hours later. Bryce, too, realized this was better than any high that could be engineered.
Afterward, she lay beside him, small and fragile in the dim light. He held her, but it felt like he was holding a memory, something distant. Maybe they would become something more significant. Maybe not. For now, he had his work, Black Fire, and those moments from the past that seemed to be creeping back.
She broke the silence with the first words of the night. “How was your day?”
He hesitated before answering, forcing himself back to the present. “It was… fine,” he managed. “We found a few Giant Killers.”